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Evening Chats with Perry Link during winter semester

Oct 15, 2018

Prof. Perry Link, professor emeritus of East Asian Studies at Princeton University, will be spending a year at the Heidelberg Centre for Transcultural Studies as an associate fellow. During the winter semester, he will offer a series of interactive lectures on his readings of Chinese intellectual fervours and the possibilities of thinking across borders; colleagues and students are invited to take an active part.

Chinese intellectuals have a traditional duty, for which there is no equivalent in the West: to worry, to "take responsibility for all under heaven," to argue the question "What can we do with China?" In his 1992 classic Evening Chats in Beijing, an "utterly absorbing gem of a book" (Library Journal), Perry Link conveys the worries besetting China’s most prominent writers, journalists, scientists, professors, and officials. Link creates "an invaluable opening onto China’s best and brightest hearts and minds" (Kirkus Reviews), allowing the Chinese themselves to tell us what happened in Beijing throughout the Cultural Fever.

Perry Link teaches and writes about modern Chinese language, literature, popular culture, and politics. He is professor emeritus of East Asian Studies at Princeton University and is currently Chancellorial Chair for Teaching Across Disciplines at the University of California at Riverside. His most recent monograph is An Anatomy of Chinese: Rhythm, Metaphor, Politics, and he is author, co-author, or editor of nineteen other books. Two of these are widely-used Chinese language textbooks. He has written about popular Chinese fiction and the popular Chinese performing art called xiangsheng ("comedians’ dialogues").

Link has translated the work of leading Chinese dissident writers including Liu Binyan, Fang Lizhi, and Liu Xiaobo, and serves on the boards of directors of several human rights organizations. He writes and does interviews for the Western press and has been a regular contributor to The New York Review of Books.

His project during his stay in Heidelberg is to finish a biography of Liu Xiaobo, the 2010 Nobel Peace Prize winner who died in July 2017 while serving an eleven-year prison sentence for "suspicion of subverting the state."

The first evening chat takes place on Wednesday, October 17 at 6 pm at the Institute of Chinese Studies in Room 208. Perry Link will talk about "Freedom and Control on the Chinese Internet."